News and Views on Social Marketing and Social Change

3 posts categorized "Environment"

Citizens can self-finance and profit from building a bioenergy facility that uses biomass (plants, wood and manure) to generate enough heat and electricity for the village that the surplus can be sold to the national grid. Nina Adam at the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported earlier this week that in Germany "a swarm of households and small-scale investors…are producing and selling renewable energy." Germany currently ranks 2nd among nations whose share of electricity generation comes from renewable sources, and it has a national goal of generating 80% from renewable sources by 2050. Could this be a blueprint for the world? What can we learn from these positive deviants?

This village of 750 people created a cooperative, applied for and received government grants and low interest loans, kicked in about $5,900 each for capital funding and to upgrade their homes' heating systems, and within three years had their money back in energy savings. And this is not one of those 'amazing communities' projects when the question is "Yes, but how do you scale this up?" Adam notes there are 92 similar bioenergy villages in Germany, with another 350 considering making similar social investments.

The appeal to me is that these are not large-scale efforts where the barriers to entry are so formidable. I can imagine bioenergy villages in small towns across the US, as well as for every major housing development and sub-division. All we may need is about a thousand people to make a biomass facility feasible and viable. What if we, as Chrisoph Burger is quoted in the article as saying, followed Germany and "turned the traditional one-way street - from energy producers to consumers - upside down" and encouraged citizens to become energy suppliers as well as users. And to further the impact of biomass energy, in the village profiled in the article the talk is now about how to use some of their surplus electricity to power electric cars. This is the type of puzzle that social marketing can be so useful in helping weave the pieces together - not only encouraging new behaviors, but helping communities find and harness the assets and capacities to bring their vision to reality, enlisting partners to create win-win-win scenarios, and helping to bridge the divides among public, private and nonprofit groups - and among the latter, I think especially of all the community foundations in the US.

If you believe that there are no coincidences, then today's story fuels the idea of local and state initiatives to create renewable energy towns in the US.

Ryan Tracy reports in the WSJ that there are no Federal requirements to use renewable energy sources that include wood and wood waste, municipal soilid waste, landfill gas and biogas (methane), ethanol and biodiesel, water, geothermal, wind and solar. Instead, those decisions are left up to the states (29 do have requirements, 14 are considering them). Several states are considering repealing their renewable energy requirements - and that's where interesting things are happening. In Kansas, wind turbine manufacturers and local famers have teamed up to block a repeal; same thing in Texas. In North Carolina, environmental groups and the pig farmers connected to kill similar efforts. It turns out that Smithfield Foods, the nation's largest pork producer, has spent tens of millions of dollars to turn manure into renewable energy.

Conservative political action groups are fingered as behind these efforts to repeal; Tracy notes that one prominent group receives funding from the fossil fuel industry. As you might expect, getting 'BIG' government out of regulating energy production and use (aka preserve the status quo) and the supposed higher costs of renewable energy sources are key arguments. But they can't seem to argue well against the fact that renewable energy sources can create local jobs (someone is sourcing the materials and running those plants) and that local solutions may be more cost-effective than having large utilities 'convert' to renewable sources. Just take a look at the "Powering Up" chart that compares the capital and on-going costs of different types of electric plants.

SO what?

Marketing the use of biomass as a renewable energy source seems to be a time that has come for both the marketplace and consumers. As long as local and state jurisdictions can continue to exercise their rights and responsibilities (that is, we don't see efforts by big business to supersede or pre-empt their ability to experiment with renewable energy and especially biomass energy projects), the pieces of a puzzle are becoming clear. Local action to create and socially profit from biomass energy production and household use can involve many different sectors of society in some innovative and productive ways. If you are a social marketer or social entrepreneur in your community, you should be watching - and thinking about action.

The lack of clear-cut personal benefits, especially in the short term, is one of the greatest challenges facing social marketers who work on environmental issues. The other is that it is often hard for individuals to see how they can make a difference with their own actions in the world of environmental stewardship and conservation.

That’s how Jay Kassirer started off in his talk, Confessions of an Environmental Social Marketer, that ranged from the beginnings of social marketing in environmental management to case studies of its application. Jay presented the evolution of the adoption of social marketing in environmental programs in four stages:

The first was the ‘end of the pipe’ approaches that are command and control in nature; primarily using regulatory and legal instruments to manage individual and corporate behaviors.

Then came efforts to educate people and teach and promote activism skills, efforts that while successful in some cases, were seen as not being able to comprehensively address the problem.

The information campaigns that followed, often imaginative, creative and evocative were likewise found to not be the single answer to encouraging broad adoption of environmentally responsible, or sustainable, behaviors.

Now is the recognition that a continuum of approaches are needed, ranging from information/education (show me), through social marketing approaches (help me) to regulations and legal interventions (make me).

Some of the points I took away from his presentation were:

Being careful with fear, guilt and shame approaches (often favored in this community of practitioners) because they can often backfire or simply lead people to turn off to the messages.

Thinking about how to use social marketing to influence an audience’s perceived reality of the threat, their personal susceptibility to the outcomes, beliefs of self efficacy (feelings of and being in control), and response efficacy, or answering their question: will what I do make a difference?

I was really intrigued by the idea that people often have the choice between fear control OR danger control when faced with threats and risk communication. That is, you can choose to manage the emotion of fear by ignoring, justifying, rationalizing the threat of simply shutting down OR you can decide to actively engage in behaviors that lead to a reduction in the threat, your susceptibility to it or in the likelihood of experiencing negative outcomes. Factoring this dichotomy of behavioral responses (you choose one way OR the other) into how we think about many types of protective behaviors we focus on in public health (HIV, immunizations, injury prevention, bioterrorism preparedness) could lead to insights into how to allow people to cross the bridge from totally emotional responses to threats to actively coping with them.

Jay finished up with several case studies on a divergent collection of conservation behaviors and audiences including getting automobile recyclers to pull out light switches from cars before crushing them and releasing the mercury they contain into the ground (and eventually seeping into ground water supplies), encouraging citizens in the greater Toronto area to reduce home energy use and vehicle pollution, and continually expanding efforts for a more water efficient Durham. These and many other cases in environmental social marketing are available at Tools of Change.

...we’re in a green bubble - a festival of
hot air by the news media, corporate America and presidential
candidates about green this and green that, but, when it comes to
actually doing something hard to bring about a green revolution at
scale - and if you don’t have scale on this you have nothing - we wimp
out. Climate change is not a hoax. The hoax is that we are really doing
something about it.